Concert Review: Alison Krauss' mood-setting music was crowd pleaser

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Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas played up the blue in bluegrass at their sold-out concert on Thursday night at the Orpheum.

Alison Krauss’ Union Station may be the only bluegrass band you’ll ever see that uses fog machines in concert.

They’ve earned the right to employ such devices, normally used to add a little hazy spectacle to much more bombastic arena rock shows. After all, the group, formally known as Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, are the rock stars of their genre, with the fiddle-playing Krauss alone holding 26 Grammys, the highest tally of any female artist and the third most of all time.

Their stature also makes them the only bluegrass band you’re ever likely to see that can sell out the 2,400-seat Orpheum on their name alone, as they did here Thursday night.

Photo by Brandon Dill

Alison Krauss

To be clear, when Krauss and company did crank up the fog this night it was not in an Ozzy Osbourne, hide-your-bats kind of way. It was — much like the band’s music — tasteful and restrained, a subtle visual effect to enhance the mood of their already richly atmospheric music.

That atmosphere was largely a melancholic one, as the band played up the blue in bluegrass. Beneath the bouncy rhythms and beguiling melodies were currents of heartache in “Ghost In This House” and despair in “Dust Bowl Children” sung by guitarist/mandolin player Dan Tyminski.

“A lot of time people come up to us and say, ‘Hey, what’s up with you people and all these sad songs all the time,’” Krauss joked as a prelude to a written request from a man in the audience. “He wanted to dedicate a song to his wife, and I thought, what could it possibly be. They’re all so negative.”

She settled on “Every Time You Say Goodbye,” the title track from the group’s 1992 album, another tale of love lost that at least had an upbeat tune.

As that choice shows, the group pulled from throughout its career for its set list material. Old favorites like “Let Me Touch You For A While” and “Stay” were particularly effective. But, indicative of a group that has often been accused of straying too far from that high lonesome sound, songs off of the band’s new record, the country chart topper Paper Airplane, including the title track and the sleepy folk number “Sinking Stone,” were underwhelming.

In a further dig at purists, who already criticize the band’s commercial country leanings, the band also augmented its standard five-piece lineup of Krauss, the co-billed Dobro master Douglas, Tyminski, guitarist/banjo player Ron Block, and bass player Barry Bales, with a sparingly used percussionist and a keyboard/accordion player.

Strangely missing from the mix were any songs from Krauss’ 2007 collaboration with Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant, Raising Sand. Granted, stylistically those songs are far from Union Station milieu, but the project’s sheer popularity would seem to warrant a reinterpretation or two.

The oversight was hardly missed by most fans, however, who were likely more pleased to hear Krauss and Tyminski include their contributions to the “O Brother Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, a landmark of Americana that celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Tyminski, “the singing voice of George Clooney” in the Coen Brothers film, gave a standard but still-rousing reading of the movie’s updating of “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow.”

Krauss meanwhile, saved her selection, “Down To the River to Pray,” with gorgeous gospel harmony from the rest of the group, for the evening’s encore, an even more stripped down run that also included her hit version of “When You Say Nothing At All,” her Brad Paisley duet “Whiskey Lullaby” and a benediction-like ‘There Is A Reason.”

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